In the fall of 2011 I discovered that our page ranking a Google was tanking. I started yipping at Ian and Penny trying to figure out where the problem was. I tore the stats apart looking for the problem and discovered it actually occurred in 2009 but was getting worse.

The better we made the site, the more images and pages we added the worse it got. Those of you with a website can relate, you spend a few hundred hours developing new pages and everything gets worse?

In that period we'd added thousands images and none were showing up. We rebuilt the pages twice trying to fix the problem. In 2008 we had 3,000,000 unique visitors, in 2011 it had dropped to 1,500,000. At first we thought it was the recession, but the more I ripped into the website the more I was convinced there was an error that was not showing in the tests.

Then we started using Google image search to look for our images. Real screwy. We've number one in Google search, but no images from us in Google search. Everyone that stole our images was number one on a regular basis, but our images were not there. Our images the were used on poetry and cooking  sites were beating our own images for Ceanothus or Salvia.  Humm? A Google contact told us are only recourse was to file MCPA (Report alleged copyright infringement) on each site for each image. We did, hundreds if not thousands of them. It helped, but just a little.
We used to not worry about folks using our images, but Google and Bing were putting the 'borrowed' images above ours and downgrading both our pages and images. Now we have to enforce the copyright under the Creative Commons License.

The clincher was when I Binged Site:laspilitas.com jpg and only got gif images back. We have about 3000 jpg images up on our site.
We fixed hours and hours of 'stuff' on the website, most you'll never notice, but it appears to have worked.
Sorry, to be so serious, but it was.